A couple weeks ago I laid down for a nap and as I was drifting off to sleep a particular name popped into my head. I immediately imagined taking an eraser to it and trying to make it disappear and the thoughts came flooding in, “NO don’t think of them again, and don’t go down that road again, fix your mind on something else, fix your mind on Jesus.” While we are told in scripture to fix our minds onto whatever is pure, lovely, noble, right, admirable, it is sometimes easier said than done. Especially if you’ve lived on this planet for any length of time. Just living in this world you’re you guaranteed to encounter pain, regret, mistakes, hardship outside of your control and it can be so easy for all those things to start playing on a loop inside your head. Right after I had those thoughts though about the eraser, I got a vision of a piece of paper with writing on it and it obviously had numerous rewrites and smudges. You could see where an eraser furiously tried to erase the words and cover up whatever was there and had been lived and written about. The paper looked dark, smudged, messy, and not very appealing. Then I saw a piece of paper that had writing on it and spots where the writing jumped out at you because it was written on what looked like white out. You’ve all seen how when you fix a mistake with whiteout, whatever is written over it looks so clean, neat, and brighter than the words surrounding it.
As I was thinking about what all that meant, I realized that our lives are like a story and words are being put to it as we live it. And an unfortunate side effect of living is that there are going to be periods of darkness, death, destruction that we are going to hurriedly try to rush over and attempt to erase them from our story. All of our attempts to fix things our way and make things better end up just making a bigger mess and they are not truly gone or healed. You can still see the smudges and dirt and darkness if you look closely no matter how hard you tried (to erase it) or how nice you wrote over it. I saw in that moment that, that was what I was trying to do with this particular part of my story and with the person who had played a role in it. All my attempts to heal myself are not truly going to make me whole again. Every tool and tactic that I come up with myself are not going to free me from this part of my story that has brought heartache, regret, sadness, the whys. Honestly what I need is Jesus. Only through Him can even the hard parts of my story be made shiny, bright, and beautiful. It is only when I surrender every situation to Him that I start to experience His truth “…that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.(Romans 8:28)” Ultimately if you’re a believer than that is true but I want to see that victory in my life in the here and now and in my thoughts and emotions. In order to be a good steward I have to give back the bad stuff that I’ve done or had happen and let Him use it for good in my life. I need Him to change the words in my story so that even the hard parts can point to Him who can make good out of every single bad situation. Where sin, bondage, heaviness, regret were, new words like forgiveness, redeemed, freedom, wisdom can take its place. The past can never be erased but what it says about your life story can be changed.
I’m still learning this. There are so many things or words I picture about my life that can make me wince but I know that He’s not finished with me yet and that it has a purpose!
***Maybe it’s not a person or relationship that comes to mind, maybe it’s a sin you’re struggling with, a failure, a betrayal, a disappointment, regret, a heartache that seems unfixable. Be encouraged that if you allow Jesus to redeem it, it has a way of becoming a thing of beauty in your life that will encourage others and give them hope.
